How many images are we expecting to get back from Percy covering the landing? About 28,470 according to this paper

Fifty years ago this week, NASA astronaut Alan B. Shepard Jr. made space history when he took a few golf swings on the Moon during the Apollo 14 mission, successfully hitting two golf balls across the lunar surface. Space enthusiasts have debated for decades just how far that second ball traveled. It seems we now have an answer, thanks to the efforts of imaging specialist Andy Saunders, who digitally enhanced archival images from that mission and used them to estimate the final resting spots of the golf balls.

Saunders, who has been working with the United States Golf Association (USGA) to commemorate Shepard's historical feat, announced his findings in a Twitter thread. Saunders concluded that the first golf ball Shepard hit traveled roughly 24 yards, while the second golf ball traveled 40 yards. //

Saunders, whose forthcoming book is entitled Apollo Remastered, estimates that a professional US Open golfer like Bryson DeChambeau could, in theory, hit a ball as far as 3.41 miles on the Moon, with a hang time of 1 minute 22 seconds—much farther (and longer) than Shepard's feat. As he told the BBC:

Unfortunately, even the impressive second shot could hardly be described as "miles and miles and miles," but of course this has only ever been regarded as a light-hearted exaggeration. The Moon is effectively one giant, unraked, rock-strewn bunker. The pressurized suits severely restricted movement, and due to their helmet's visors they struggled to even see their feet. I would challenge any club golfer to go to their local course and try to hit a six-iron, one-handed, with a one-quarter swing out of an unraked bunker. Then imagine being fully suited, helmeted, and wearing thick gloves. Remember also that there was little gravity to pull the clubhead down toward the ball. The fact that Shepard even made contact and got the ball airborne is extremely impressive.

And of course, the astronaut's legacy as the first human to play golf on the Moon remains secure.

At precisely 8:42:47 p.m. EST tonight (Sunday, 7 February), a new record will be set in the annals of U.S. human spaceflight, when Dragon Resilience—the vehicle which delivered Crew-1 astronauts Mike Hopkins, Victor Glover, Shannon Walker and Soichi Noguchi to the International Space Station (ISS), last November—passes 84 days, one hour, 15 minutes and 30 seconds in flight.

Video Credit: NASA
In doing so, the hardy little SpaceX ship will eclipse Skylab 4’s almost-five-decade-old achievement for the longest single mission by an American crewed orbital spacecraft. Current plans call for Dragon Resilience and her four-member crew to return to Earth in late April or early May, targeting a record-setting duration for a U.S. piloted vehicle of around 165 days in space.

When the Skylab 4 mission launched atop a Saturn IB rocket from historic Pad 39B at the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida at 10:01:23 a.m. EST on 16 November 1973, its three-man crew knew they were aiming for one of the longest orbital voyages ever attempted at that time. Two previous flights to America’s Skylab space station had recorded 28 and 59 days aloft, respectively, whilst the Soviet Union had achieved 23 days with its ill-fated Soyuz 11 crew.

Two trips, a decade apart, spanned the most exciting era in space history.

Of the original seven astronauts chosen by NASA in 1959, only one, Alan Shepard, made it to the moon. And he almost didn’t. More than two years after his pioneering Mercury-Redstone flight in May 1961, Shepard was in training to command the first two-man Gemini mission. Progress to the moon was planned in three steps: Mercury to prove that space travel was feasible, Gemini to demonstrate rendezvous and long-term spaceflight, and Apollo to go all the way. In 1963, Shepard was a fair bet to fly all three.

N905NA
The first Boeing 747 that NASA purchased was a -100 variant previously registered as N9668. According to Planespotters.net, American Airlines initially took delivery of this aircraft in October 1970. It was one of 16 747-100s that the carrier operated between 1970 and 1985. However, American soon found it was struggling to fill these mammoth airliners. //

NASA eventually withdrew N905NA from use in 2013, a year after the final shuttle-carrying flights. The following year, it was dismantled and then transported to the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas for preservation. Since 2016, it has been on display in an area of the center called ‘Independence Plaza,’ with a replica Space Shuttle attached to it.

N911NA
NASA did not obtain its second Shuttle Carrier Aircraft, N911NA, until 1988, shortly after the Challenger disaster in 1986. Planespotters.net reports that this 747-100SR (‘Short Range’) came from Japan Airlines, where it had entered service on high-capacity domestic routes in 1973. Its original registration was JA8117. //

Despite being the newer of NASA’s two Shuttle Carrier Aircraft, N911NA was the first to be withdrawn from service. This occurred in February 2012, and, before preservation, NASA used the aircraft as a spare parts source for its ‘SOFIA‘ flying telescope 747SP. N911NA eventually entered preservation two years later and is now on display at the Joe Davies Heritage Air Park in Palmdale, California.

It’s hard to care about bootprints sunk in soil 238,900 miles away as humanity suffers the combined burden of an unforgiving virus and a political unease. But how humans treat those bootprints and the historic lunar landing sites upon which they are found will speak volumes about who we humans are and who we seek to become.

On Dec. 31, the One Small Step to Protect Human Heritage in Space Act became law. As far as laws go, it’s pretty benign. It requires companies that are working with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration on lunar missions to agree to be bound by otherwise unenforceable guidelines intended to protect American landing sites on the Moon. That’s a pretty small pool of affected entities. However, it is also the first law enacted by any nation that recognizes the existence of human heritage in outer space. //

But what about a derelict spacecraft, like the Eagle, the Apollo 11 lunar lander? Do we really want to rely on “due regard” to prevent the intentional or inadvertent destruction of this inspiring piece of history? This object memorializes the work of the hundreds of thousands of individuals who worked to put a human on the Moon, the astronauts and cosmonauts who gave their lives in this quest to reach the stars, and the quiet heroes, like Katherine Johnson, who fueled the math that made it so.

The lunar landing sites – from Luna 2, the first human made object to impact the Moon, to each of the crewed Apollo missions, to Chang-e 4, which deployed the first rover on the far side of the Moon – in particular bear witness to humanity’s greatest technological achievement thus far. They symbolize all we have accomplished as a species, and hold such promise for the future. //

The One Small Step Act is true to its name. It’s a small step. It applies only to companies that are working with NASA; it pertains only to U.S. lunar landing sites; it implements outdated and untested recommendations to protect historic lunar sites implemented by NASA in 2011. However, it offers significant breakthroughs. It is the first legislation from any nation to recognize an off-Earth site as having “outstanding universal value” to humanity, language taken from the unanimously ratified World Heritage Convention.

The notion of reusing rockets finally went mainstream in 2020. As the year progressed, it became clear that SpaceX launch customers have gotten a lot more comfortable with flying on used, or "flight-proven," first stages of the Falcon 9 rocket. One commercial customer, Sirius, launched its XM-7 satellite on the seventh flight of a Falcon 9 booster in December. Also, the first national security payload flew on a reused booster last month when the US National Reconnaissance Office launched its NROL-108 mission on the fifth flight of a Falcon 9 first stage.

NASA, too, agreed to fly future crewed missions to the International Space Station—beginning with the Crew-2 spaceflight in the spring of 2021—on used Falcon 9 rockets. And the US Space Force said it would launch its GPS III satellites on used boosters in the future as well. These are among the highest-value missions the United States has. //

NASA deserves credit for pioneering work in reusable spaceflight. The space shuttle was the world's first partially reusable launch system, with the orbiter and solid rocket boosters capable of multiple flights after significant refurbishment. But it wasn't cheap—the best independent estimate of the shuttle's cost over the lifetime of the program is about $1.5 billion per launch.

NASA Uses Powerful Supercomputers and AI to Map Earth’s Trees, Discovers Billions of Trees in West African Drylands //

Scientists from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and international collaborators demonstrated a new method for mapping the location and size of trees growing outside of forests, discovering billions of trees in arid and semi-arid regions and laying the groundwork for more accurate global measurement of carbon storage on land.

Arecibo Telescope's illustrious scientific career is over.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) will decommission Arecibo Observatory's massive radio dish after damage has made the facility too dangerous to repair, the agency announced today (Nov. 19).

The announcement came as scientists awaited a verdict about the fate of the iconic observatory after damage to the complex cabling supporting a 900-ton science platform suspended over the dish. In August, a cable slipped out of its socket, but engineers evaluating the situation deemed it stable; earlier this month, a second cable unexpectedly snapped, leaving Arecibo's fate much more perilous. After considering three separate engineering reports, the NSF, which owns the property, has decided the facility is unstable enough that there is no way to repair the damage that does not put personnel at undue risk.

For the first time ever, scientists have identified water on the moon's sunlit surface. They also found that water is more common on the moon than previously thought, with pockets of ice hiding in shadowy regions of "eternal darkness," some as small as a penny, new studies reveal.

'Challenger: The Final Flight' successfully tackles the anticipation, tragedy, and recovery involving the defining national event of a generation. //

“It was a totally clear sky…it was ‘Mars to CAVU,’ as we used to say, ‘clear and visibility unlimited.’ It was just a beautiful day,” recounts William Harwood, the longtime Cape Canaveral bureau chief for United Press International. “It was just very cold.”

On Jan. 28, 1986, after crews had finished scrapping off hundreds of giant icicles that had formed the night before, and following two days of scrubbed launches, the 25th flight of the United States Space Shuttle Program was finally cleared to go.

Onboard the shuttle Challenger were astronauts Ronald McNair, Ellison Onizuka, Judy Resnik, Francis Richard Scobee, Michael Smith, payload specialist Gregory Jarvis, and Christa McAuliffe — a social studies teacher hailing from Concord High School in New Hampshire and set to be the first civilian in space.

Unknown to the crew of the Challenger, it would be the last mission of the spacecraft. Just 73 seconds into the flight, at an altitude of approximately 46,000 feet, it was over.

They were all gone.

Comprising four episodes and a combined three hours, Netflix’s new documentary, “Challenger: The Final Flight,” successfully tackles the anticipation, tragedy, and recovery involving one of the defining events of national mourning between the assassination of J.F.K. and 9/11.

In a period where much of the output from Hollywood is either uninspired or, conversely, overburdened — and frequently ruined — by the desire to shock audiences by being overly brazen or bizarre, in many respects, what Abrams and his team have produced feels akin to their source material: the product of a bygone era.

True, the cinematography benefits from the latest digital technology, and the score feels more nuanced and authentic than something that would have been composed a generation earlier, but everything else about the production feels refreshingly familiar, albeit with a 2020 up-gloss. //

Ultimately, “Challenger: The Final Fight” is an incredibly pro-life documentary; not in the sense of being anti-abortion, but in the authentic and moving ways it pays tribute to the seven lives that were lost that cold January day 34 years ago. At the end of the miniseries, few viewers will be lamenting the $3.2 billion cost of the disaster — they’ll be left saddened, sore, and shaking their heads at the wholly unnecessary deaths of the brave Americans who boarded the final flight of the Space Shuttle Challenger.

The Europa Clipper is poised to be one of the most important vessels in the history of exploration — if only government largesse would get out of the way. //

There’s only one problem: today, it’s illegal for it to be taken to space via any existing launch vehicle. The Europa Clipper has been dosed with a poison pill of pork which has endangered the entire mission. //

While a swelling trend of privatization is sweeping space exploration and leading to billions in savings, the Clipper has been legally forbidden from being launched on a private rocket. Quietly slipped into page 129 of a bloated omnibus spending bill from 2016 is a legal requirement that the Clipper can only take to space if it is on the Space Launch System.

The Space Launch System, or SLS, is a $28 billion government rocket program intended to replace the extinct shuttle program. It’s now billions over budget, and after nearly a decade of development still only exists in the imaginations of artists and politicians.

No other NASA mission in history has been forbidden by force of law from using a private rocket. The negative consequences of this law, however, are immense.

“At some point, commercial entities are going to catch up.”

The OGO-1 geophysics satellite's long space odyssey is nearly at an end.

In 2015, Oak Ridge National Laboratory produced the first plutonium fuel in the US in nearly 30 years. Now it’s headed to another planet. //

At the heart of Perseverance is a small “nuclear battery” the size of a beer keg called a radioisotope thermoelectric generator, or RTG. Unlike the nuclear reactors that create electricity on Earth, RTGs don’t have to initiate or sustain a fission reaction to generate power. They don’t even have any moving parts. Instead, they passively harvest the natural heat produced by the decay of plutonium-238 and convert it into electricity. They can reliably provide energy and heat to a spacecraft for decades—the two plutonium-powered Voyager probes launched in the late 1970s are still transmitting from interstellar space—and have been NASA’s go-to power source for more than two dozen deep-space missions.

“Plutonium-238 is a unique isotope of plutonium that principally decays by alpha radiation, and because of that, it generates a lot of heat,” says Robert Wham, the plutonium supply program manager at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which is now responsible for making the stuff for NASA. “For a small spacecraft like Perseverance, you don’t want fission power. You just want thermal decay.” //

When the US got out of the plutonium business, it left NASA with a cache of a few dozen kilograms of plutonium-238 to ration for all future missions. It wasn’t much; the Perseverance rover alone uses nearly 5 kilograms of plutonium. At some point, this stockpile was bound to run out; a 2009 report by the National Academy of Sciences predicted that the US had only enough plutonium for a few more deep-space missions. That left the US with a few unpalatable options: Abandon exploration of the outer solar system, purchase plutonium from abroad, or start making it again domestically. //

With concerns about a plutonium shortage mounting—Russia was also running low—NASA policymakers decided the agency would foot the bill on its own. And since 2011, NASA has borne almost the entire cost of producing plutonium at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. The investment soon paid off. By 2015, chemists at Oak Ridge produced the first sample of plutonium-238 in the US in nearly 30 years. At the same time, the lab invested heavily in automated production systems that would allow it to produce enough plutonium to meet NASA’s future needs. //

The process starts when researchers at Idaho National Lab send neptunium-237, itself a radioactive metallic oxide, to Tennessee, where automated machines press it into pellets the size of pencil erasers. Next, 52 of these pellets are stacked into metal rods called targets and placed in a nuclear reactor at either Oak Ridge or Idaho National Lab, where they are bombarded with neutrons to produce plutonium. After it’s left to cool for a few months, the plutonium is shipped to Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, where another machine presses the small plutonium pellets to form larger ones the size of marshmallows. Then they’re ensconced in a casing made out of iridium, a virtually indestructible metal that would prevent radioactive contamination in case of an accident when the rover is launched. Finally, the armored plutonium is shipped to Idaho National Lab, where 32 pellets are loaded into the rover’s nuclear battery before it’s installed on the vehicle.

Today, Oak Ridge is only producing about half of its target of 3.5 pounds of plutonium a year, a milestone Wham and his colleagues plan to hit by the mid-2020s.

Dozens of times over the last decade NASA scientists have launched laser beams at a reflector the size of a paperback novel about 240,000 miles (385,000 kilometers) away from Earth. They announced today, in collaboration with their French colleagues, that they received signal back for the first time

Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley describe returning to Earth from the ISS in SpaceX's vehicle. //

During the last ever shuttle mission - STS-135 - in 2011, the crew left a US flag on the space station with the intention that the next crew to launch on a US vehicle return it to Earth. Nine years later, Hurley and Behnken have brought back the symbolic item, which also flew on the first shuttle mission in 1981.

NASA chose the Apollo 11 landing site for engineering simplicity, but it had scientific benefits nevertheless.

Finally we talk about the important part about space travel: pooping.

Was there a backup plan in case the Shuttle toilet malfunctioned?

What was the plan in case the Space Shuttle toilet malfunctioned? How were the astronauts expected to then handle their waste? Did they carry Apollo-style fecal collection assemblies (poop bags)? Or did they just have extra fecal containment systems (diapers)? //

According to Scott Manley, they did indeed carry Apollo-style poop bags. But those were so distasteful that a mission could be scrubbed if that was all they had to rely on. youtube.com/watch?v=w5y0mTqK54k – Greg Jun 24 at 17:41 //

Some non-catastrophic failures of the WCS could be worked around.

• Mechanical failures of the commode control handle or linkage could be worked around using procedures in the In-flight Maintenance Checklist. //

• Finally, if both fan/separators were failed, urinal operations could be recovered by connecting the urinal hose directly to the waste water overboard dump system. However, this resulted in a direct connection from the crewmember to vacuum, and the procedure contained this immortal warning.

WARNING: Urinal connected to vacuum. Allow for airflow. Do not 'Hard Dock' w/Urinal Funnel. Physical injury possible.

(From In Flight Maintenance Checklist section W, not currently online) //

NASA seem to like sneaking dry jokes into their technical documentation, and the euphemistic use of the term "hard dock" is perhaps my new favourite example. – anaximander Jun 23 at 16:10

@GdD early on there were lots of problems. The original version included a "slinger" - yes, the feces was supposed to hit the fan - and that liked to fail. A search through the Shuttle Missions Summary for 'wcs' turns up many examples. https://spaceflight.nasa.gov/outreach/SignificantIncidents/assets/space-shuttle-missions-summary.pdf Feel free to ask a followup for details. – Organic Marble Jun 23 at 16:21 //

[do] We have a badge for know your sh**? – Anthony Stevens Jun 23 at 18:42

Next on English.SE: when feces not hitting the fan is the cause of your problem, does the expression "when shit hits the fan" still apply? – Mast Jun 24 at 7:00

This is why regular space tourism is still a long way off. Training your average Joe and Jane Hawaiian-shirt wearing sightseers how to properly use the space-commodes is probably unlikely to work at scale any time soon. – Darrel Hoffman Jun 25 at 13:55

A SpaceX Falcon 9 booster is on track to smash an orbital-class rocket reuse record set by a NASA Space Shuttle orbiter in 1985 – and in more ways than one. On July 11th, SpaceX announced that Falcon 9 booster B1058 had successfully completed a static fire ignition test a few days prior to its … //

Michael Baylor
@nextspaceflight
If Falcon 9 first stage B1058-2 launches before July 23, it would beat the current record turnaround time of an orbital class rocket. The record is currently 54 days between Shuttle Atlantis' STS-51-J and STS-61-B missions.